Beyond the Beginner is not a biography, although many are drawn to its weft. Rather, this is a book about why life stories matter. Both Carlyle’s careers were devoted to exploring the value of human life, but philosophy favored the abstract, while biography favored the concrete: an individual with a mother and a name. Carlyle writes, “Socrates asked throughout Athens ‘What is human being?'” “I wondered World Health Organization This unique person is. As a biographer, she also tried to create art that “brought something new and unique to the world” – a world “that the philosophical part of us wants to cleanse.”
Some philosophers will balk at this minor “tidying up,” as if the great thinkers who constructed visions of the world were nothing more than metaphysical Marie Kondos. Not me. Carlyle was entitled to ridicule her colleagues for overestimating the power of rational argument and preferring false simplicity to complex truth. In any case, her contrast is tentative: she is open to drawing on personal moral philosophy and the art of doing philosophical work.
But there is a lingering tension in Carlyle’s book, one that has to do with her touchstone, the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. To those familiar with his thinking, the concept of a Spinozist biographer seemed as logical as a vegetarian butcher or a pacifist contract killer. For Spinoza, there is only one substance, the impersonal God, and everything else is just a “mode” or modification of that substance, a ripple in the ocean of existence. We are all ontological bubbles. As Carlyle said:
On the surface, biography is a genre of the whole subject—a person interacting with others but distinct from them, rather than dissolving in a sea of matter. For Carlyle, however, the “metaphysical selfishness” of a world composed of discrete human beings “reinforces the moral selfishness and vice versa.” Spinoza is the antidote to conceit. But what space is left in his metaphysics for the value of individual life?
Carlyle found the answer in the microscopic world. If everything is an aspect of God, we can predict in a person the value of the whole—the divine itself. This way of looking at human life is thoroughly democratic. Carlyle’s book begins when she is in her twenties, halfway up a mountain in Dharamshala, India, when she meets a man who has made his home in a small cave, tends a stone temple and makes a living selling concessions to tourists. When he was sixteen or seventeen years old, he left this world and lived an ascetic life. What struck Carlisle most was how ordinary he seemed. “Over the years, I have met people who exuded a distinct spiritual quality, some rare insight, depth or tranquility that you could feel just being in their presence,” she points out. “That man on the mountain was not such a man.” Later in the book, we meet another ascetic, Ramana Maharshi, who spent his life on a sacred mountain in the Himalayas called Arunachala. Maharshi became a famous spiritual teacher, fictionalized by Somerset Maugham in The Razor’s Edge. Both lives are noble, both beautifully evoked: it makes no sense for a Spinozist biographer to place one above the other, the famous over the unknown, since they are simply different faces of the same mountain.
Carlyle therefore argued for the value of the non-heroic life. This debate is most evident in works of art: George Eliot’s heroines, for example, or Celia Paul’s careful portraits of her mother. Eliot, the first English translation of Spinoza’s Ethics, lived in an era that worshiped “great men”: Thomas Carlyle wrote “On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroes of History” in 1841, and Ralph Waldo Emerson published “Representative Men” in 1850. Eliot’s riposte was “Middlemarch,” in which Dorothea Brooke devotes herself to seeking help from her self-deluded husband, Edward Casaubon, only to later discover that his great work was a sham. Dorothea lived less than she had hoped for, but her life mattered nonetheless, as the final lines of “Middlemarch” sing: “The world’s increasing growth depends partly on unhistorical acts; and you and I are not as badly off as they might have been, partly thanks to those who faithfully lived their secret lives and rested in unvisited graves.”